Posted
by
Unknown Lameron Wednesday May 09, 2012 @08:55AM
from the throw-a-few-executives-at-it dept.

Trailrunner7 writes, quoting Threat Post: "Carrier IQ, a startup heavily bruised last fall by harsh criticism of its handset diagnostic software, today announced it's hired a high-profile lawyer as its Chief Privacy Officer. Magnolia Mansourkia Mobley, a CIPP and former Verizon executive, will be tasked with quickly broadening the company's focus on consumer privacy. She also was named the company's General Counsel. The company became the flashpoint in a heated controversy after initial reports its analytics software, embedded in some 150 mobile phones, was capable of gathering a great deal of personal data without the customer's consent."

Umm. Wow.Even with laws it is a good idea to pay attention to what you are doing.Know what you are signing.Not believe everything you hear.Do not walk alone in the dark in a ghetto.Carry protection.Stay aware.It is always best to protect yourself and then when you fail maybe a law or a cop will happen to help you out.As GP stated correctly. Just waiting around for some government to protect you is a really bad way to go through life.

I hope that people and privacy advocates would look at Google Analytics too. It is basically the same CarrierIQ is, only made for webpages. And Google has been abusing it for almost 10 years already.

No it isn't...it isn't even close to the same thing. CarrierIQ was capturing keystrokes, even though they said otherwise. CarrierIQ was something you could not block or neuter all all, unlike Google Analytics. A subset of what CarrierIQ does is slightly similar to what Google Analytics does, if instead of allowing the cellular carrier to diagnose mobile device issues you think in terms of a website owner looking at the traffic patterns within their own site, but that's not the subset that anyone cares a

Google analytics is all about gathering and selling marketing data. Providing usability data is useful when it comes time to convince site owners that they should use it, but that doesn't pay the bills in Mountain View.

Google wants to know every user habit related to on line sales. They know what ads you've seen. They know what keywords you searched on prior to making a purchase. They know which sites you visited prior to the purchase. And if you use Google Checkout or Google Wallet, they even know what yo

Google analytics can be easily blocked, as/and it doesn't live in your system as an effective trojan.

It's not a good thing, but that's why you simply block it. Ghostery does this just fine for example.

Actually, you can't just block Google Analytics anymore - a lot of sites are purposely redirecting links THROUGH Google Analytics - you click the link, a javascript runs that passes the URL to Google which then redirects you to the next page.

As I understand it, as shipped, CIQ wasn't too bad - the problem was that carriers were allowed to modify and extend it, and extend it they did such that it collected more information, and the user-accessible shutoff present in as-shipped CIQ software never was seen in a deployed phone.

They can hire all the privacy lawyers they want - no one is ever again going to trust a carrier to implement their software properly, and any attempt to reinsert their software into a device WILL result in a shitstorm.

There is a german proverb for things like this: "Den Bock zum Gärtner machen" not sure if a proper analogy exists in English. (Rough translation "Making a goat your gardener", doesn't have the ring though)

I think their new legal counsel used to be a man, because Magnolia Mansourkia Mobley totally sounds like a sex change name. No real woman would use a name like that unless she has delusions of royalty or something.